OK for a monster movie but...

Rating: 6/10 (12 October 2013)

If it's stunning CGI then Pacific Rim has to be near the top. The story and character development is OK, but the one thing I will remember about the movie is the CGI. Which makes for a fairly forgettable movie..
The Kaiju themselves, as well as the Jaeger way of dealing with them, was incredible, but OK if we accept that the name-of-the-game is popcorn fantasy/escapism. But for the serious sci-fi geek like myself, I couldn't help being plagued throughout by the thought of what a silly way it was of dealing with them. What, you think one of these things could not be taken out by a well-placed cruise missile, or an air-to-surface one for that matter.
If the world's survival was really at stake, low-yield nuclear munitions would be employed. What creature can withstand a 1 kiloton direct-hit? (unless they had some sort of impenetrable force-field, but then they'd be invulnerable to just about anything anyway, including Jaeger attack). Hiding is not an option if you're a Kaiju.
Still, nothing is as impressive as giants in hand-to-hand combat, which is clearly the point of the whole exercise. Everything else in the movie - Mako's past story, brain-melding with a Kaiju, final destruction of the inter-dimensional link - seemed to be subsumed to this one goal, of showing titans striving to defeat the other, so that by the end of the movie I was clock-watching (boring...). Promising thread, like the Kaiju being directed systematically by some higher intelligence, and brain-melding with them, were never explored in any depth.
I guess it's what puts bums-on-seats and makes that ca'ching sound that mostly counts, not making intelligent sci-fi.
Still happy to have this in my SF collection, but the best it is not.